Text Structure: A Roadmap for Reading (SOR Summer Series Part 2)

You’re listening to episode number 199 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

Welcome back to the second episode in our Stellar Teacher Science Of Reading Summer Series. During the next six weeks, I’m going to be sharing a bonus episode every Thursday that is going to share either an actionable strategy, some helpful information or a little nugget that is really going to make it easier for you to align your instruction with the science of reading. Now, if you are just tuning in to our series for the first time, let me encourage you to go back and listen to episode number 197, where I shared three steps that you can take to focus on building knowledge during your literacy block. And I also shared a really important encouragement reminder regarding your journey as a literacy teacher. And I’d really hate for you to miss that. So go listen to episode 197 real quick, and then come back and join me here.

Now, before I talk about today’s specific focus, which has to do with text structure, which is one of my favorite topics, I always like to start off with an explanation of what the science of reading is and why it’s important. So if you’re a regular listener of the podcast, then you probably have heard me break down and talk about Scarborough’s reading rope, which is one of my favorite models. But there is another model that can really help us understand the science of reading. And so we’re going to switch things up here a little bit. And I’m going to use this simple view of reading, to really help you understand what the science of reading is. And the simple view of reading ultimately, gives us just a really straightforward math formula to understand how reading comprehension works. So I want you to imagine that reading comprehension is the result of a multiplication formula. And that formula is word recognition, times language comprehension equals reading comprehension. And this is how it works. Word recognition is a student’s ability to recognize and decode the words on a page, where language comprehension is really about understanding and making meaning from the words and texts, whether we read them or we are listening to them. And according to this model, both components are essential. And they function like factors in a multiplication problem. So that means that if either word recognition or language comprehension has a score of zero, then reading comprehension falls to zero. For example, if a student has a perfect language comprehension score, we’ll say as one, but they cannot recognize or decode words, which means their word recognition would be a zero. One times zero means that their overall reading comprehension is a zero. And on the other side, if a student can decode every single word beautifully, we’ll say that is scored as a one, but they fail to understand the meaning of the words. That means that their language comprehension would be at a zero, and again, one times zero equals zero.

This really helps us understand that reading comprehension requires proficiency in both decoding and understanding. Because without both of them, a student’s ability to comprehend a text is going to be compromised. So as literacy teachers, even in upper elementary, we want to be paying attention to how our students are decoding the words and how they are understanding the words.

And we want to look for ways that we can improve both students word recognition and language comprehension skills. And there are many, many elements that fall into both of those broader categories. And one of the elements that really helps with language comprehension is understanding text structure and how texts are organized. And I love talking about text structure.

Now before I share some really practical things, let me share a misunderstanding that I had regarding text structure. So when I first heard the term text structure, is when I became a fourth grade teacher. I started my teaching career in first grade and sent to second grade and then in the middle of a school year, one year I got moved up to fourth grade. And shortly after I got moved to fourth grade, we started teaching informational text structure, and honestly, I had never heard that term before. That is not something that we taught in first grade or second grade. And because this was my first experience with it, when I thought about text structure, I really only thought about it in terms of the five types of informational text structure. You know, that was a standard that I had to teach in Texas. I knew that my students need to be able to identify the structure of an informational text. So of course, we talked a lot about compare and contrast, cause and effect, description, problem and solution and sequence. But that is really sort of the extent that I took my text structure instruction. And I didn’t really think about structure beyond those five aspects.

But the reality of it is old texts, even fiction, and poetry and biographies, and really, any text has a structure, because texts structure simply refers to the organization of the text. And there are some pretty consistent ways that authors organize their ideas in a text so that they make sense to a reader. And obviously, I had been teaching things like the story elements and plot structure. You know, it’s like one of those things where I’m like, because it did not say text structure, because it used plot structure I did not make the connection is sometimes so funny the things that we like, think about. So anyways, since then, I’ve really understood that text structure goes much further than the informational text structure. And it really is something that we want to help our students understand because text structure serves such a big purpose in reading. And there’s a bunch of reasons why it is so important.

So when our students have a really strong understanding of text structure, and how texts are organized, it is first of all really going to help them identify the key ideas and concepts in a text. It’s also going to help them understand the relationships between ideas or people and events that are presented in the text. It’s going to help them anticipate how information is going to be presented. So it serves kind of like as a warm up for them so they understand what to expect when they’re reading. Also, having a strong text structure knowledge is a form of background knowledge, and can give students some of that mental Velcro that we talked about in last week’s episode, that really helps what they read stick in their minds. Text structure knowledge helps students create mental models, it clues students into the purpose or reason the author wrote the text. I could keep going on and on, but as you can easily see, text structure is important.

I always like to say that text structure is like the roadmap for reading. You know, it helps students successfully navigate and understand the text. So what I want to encourage you with today, is to really expand your thinking of text structure. In order to really empower your students to comprehend what they read. In shifting the balance, the authors Carrie Yates, Jan Birkins, and Katie Egan Cunningham explain that there are at least three different levels of structure that build on each other in well written texts. And that can support readers and understanding what they’re reading. And if we know that there is something that supports readers, then we want to be doing that in our classrooms. So ultimately, we want to be aware of and address all three levels of text structure in our classroom.

And the first structure that we want to really know about and support our students with is language structure, which simply means that we understand how a sentence is organized. And y’all know that I love talking about sentence structure, aka syntax, which really just explains the rules for how we organize sentences. And in the Reading Comprehension Blueprint, Nancy Hennessy shares that “the ability to make sense of sentences is a crucial contributor to how a reader builds a mental representation of meaning”. And she goes on to explain that comprehension begins at the sentence level, which I think sometimes we forget about that, you know, we think about comprehension as this big picture thing. But in reality, our students need to understand the meaning behind individual sentences if we want them to understand the meaning of an entire text. So this means that our students really need to have a strong understanding of things like types of phrases, types of clauses, connective words, like subordinating and coordinating conjunctions and how they connect ideas together. Our students need to understand the different types of sentences like questions, statements, commands, exclamations, and they need to understand the various ways that we can structure a sentence, simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences. Now, more than likely, you are covering some of these things during your writing block. And you’re maybe even using something like our sentence writing routine to help you do that. Now, if you have not grabbed that free copy yet, you can do so at stellarteacher.com/sentences. We’ll link to it in the show notes.

But in addition to talking about language structure during writing, we really want to be intentional about bringing it up during reading as well. We want our students to understand how to break apart and understand the sentences that they are reading. Now a really easy thing that you can do each time you read is to pick out one sentence and break it apart. You can spend just a few minutes deconstructing it with your students. And this is something that you could do before you begin reading while you are reading or even after. You could do this as you’re reading a class novel, you can do it with a reading passage during a small group or if you’re reviewing an independent practice text. Basically, any text you are reading, you can deconstruct a sentence. So what are you doing when you deconstruct a sentence? First of all, you’re going to read it to your students. I think it also can be helpful if the sentence can be displayed on the board so your entire class can see it. And then you can either ask your students questions, or you can teach them something about that sentence. So maybe you’re going to identify the phrases and name the head noun or the head verb. Maybe you’re going to identify the parts of speech and the function of each word. Maybe you’re going to identify the sentence type and explain any special features. Maybe it’s a simple sentence with a compound predicate, or a complex sentence that begins with a dependent clause. Maybe you would identify a conjunction and explain the ideas that it connects. Or you might identify a pronoun and talk about the noun that it is replacing. And all of these things are things that we want our students to be really competent in. Because having strong sentence structure, knowledge is going to set our students up for success when it comes to comprehending what they’re reading. And I know that incorporating in sentence deconstruction, or sentence breakdown, whatever you want to call it during your read aloud might be something that is unfamiliar or new for some teachers.

And if that is you, then we would love to help you next year. And have you join us inside the Stellar Literacy Collective. Our brand new whole group lesson sets for third, fourth and fifth grade teachers have built in sentence structure practice. So during or with the lesson, we give you a shared text, we identify a sentence that you can focus on, we give you the language to deconstruct it with your students, we give you the slides to display it. So if that sounds like something that would be helpful for you, we’d love to have you learn more, check out a sample and add your name to the waitlist at stellarteacher.com/waitlist.

So the next structure that we want our students to be aware of is paragraph structure. And that is simply we want our students to understand how a paragraph is organized. And this is obviously important, because the texts our students read are organized into paragraphs. And we want our students to understand the purpose and the function of the paragraphs that is going to help improve their comprehension. And I think it’s really important to talk about paragraph structure from a reading perspective, because oftentimes, the writing structure that we teach students for Paragraph Writing doesn’t always show up in the texts that they read. Think about it when students are first learning to write, especially Paragraph Writing, we teach them that a paragraph begins with a topic sentence. It includes three to five supporting details, and it has a concluding sentence. And that is a perfectly fine strategy for teaching students how to compose a paragraph. But not every paragraph they encounter, and the texts that they read are going to have that same structure. So we simply want students to be aware of different paragraph structures they might see in the text that they read. And so to help with that awareness, one thing that you could do is have students use the RAP strategy. This is super simple. And it really helps students just identify a paragraph and figure out really the main point or the main purpose of the paragraph. And students will simply read the paragraph, they will ask themselves what the main idea or details were in that paragraph, and then they will paraphrase what was written. And this is a strategy that I had my students do all the time when they were reading. And it really just helps them focus on each paragraph as opposed to thinking about the text as a whole. Or sometimes the students maybe miss details in a paragraph. So the RAP strategy is an easy thing that you can have students do that really help them just focus on the organization of paragraphs in the text that they’re reading.

And then of course, the final aspect of text structure is super structure, or just aka text structure, what we typically think about with text structure, and that is having our students understand how a whole text is organized. And obviously, this is the part of text structure that you are probably the most familiar with. And if you’re an upper elementary teacher, you’re probably already teaching it to your students. You probably introduce them to plot structure and things like the story mountain when you’re reading fiction. You probably are introducing them to the five types of informational text structure when you teach nonfiction, and maybe you are even introducing them to different structures for writing poetry. So if you’ve already been teaching text structure, give yourself a high five or a pat on the back because you’ve already been incorporating an SOR aligned practice all along.

Now, I do want to share with you a few tips that can really help you enhance your text structure instruction. And the first one is to use exemplar texts. When you are first explicitly teaching text structure, whether it is the story mountain, or even that fiction stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, or the different types of nonfiction text structure. You want to find a text that is a really clear example and show students that clear example before you maybe move into complex texts or texts that have multiple structures. So using an exemplar text is a great tool to use when you’re first explicitly teaching it. The other thing that you can do is use a graphic organizer, AKA a visual representation. And text structure specific graphic organizers might be something like a Venn diagram to compare and contrast or it might be the story mountain. And these can be a great tool to both preview the texts before reading, and to help students organize their thinking during and after reading. And then the third thing that you can do is teaching your students keywords. Now, this one is tricky. And I want to remind teachers that we don’t want our students to solely rely just on keywords to understand the text structure, because sometimes keywords aren’t always consistent, but we do want them to be aware of them that keywords can be a signal. So for example, similar to, different from, both, those key words can oftentimes indicate that there is a compare and contrast text structure.

And then my final reminder is about when it comes to teaching text structure is ultimately not to teach it in isolation, but to really intentionally connect it to other comprehension skills. Like I mentioned at the start of this episode, text structure knowledge connects to and supports student application of so many other skills, helping students identify the main idea, summarizing understandings, author’s purpose, but really, I think the reason why we want to connect text structure to all of those other standards is not for the sake of helping students master those standards. But really, when students can connect multiple comprehension strategies and knowledge together, it’s just going to help them better understand the text that they’re reading, which is always our ultimate goal.

Okay, so just to recap, having text structure knowledge is a key part and helping students develop their language comprehension skills, which we know from the simple view of reading is really important for overall reading comprehension. And we can expand our understanding of text structure to include language structures, which means understanding how single sentences are organized paragraph structures, which means understanding how paragraphs are organized, overall text structure, which means understanding how the ideas in a text are organized.

I hope that this episode has given you some ideas for how you can focus on text structure this next school year. Now don’t forget, add your name to the waitlist for the Stellar Literacy Collective. If you are looking for resources to help you implement the ideas that you hear on the podcast, you can do so at stellarteacher.com/waitlist. And I hope you’ll tune in on Monday for our regular episode of the Stellar Teacher Podcast, and then plan on coming back next Thursday for our third episode in our Stellar Teacher Science of Reading Summer Series. And I really do love that alliteration. Okay. See you next week, my friend.

Thanks so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode and are finding value in this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you subscribe and leave a five star positive review. This helps me spread the word to more and more teachers just like you. Don’t forget to join me over on Instagram @thestellarteachercompany. And you can also find links and resources from this episode in the show notes at stellarteacher.com. I’ll see you back here next week.